Use trends to make your product more interesting to customers right now, but be very cautious. Don’t layer on a trend just for the sake of being trendy—it’s better to be successful and boring, rather than fashionable and bewildering.

Position yourself in a market that makes your strengths obvious to the folks you want to sell to.

Great positioning rarely comes by default. If you want to succeed, you have to determine the best way to position your product. Deliberate, try, fail, test and try again.

want to leave you with some key takeaways: Any product can be positioned in multiple markets. Your product is not doomed to languish in a market where nobody understands how awesome it is.

There are already stores full of books that can teach you how to do a better job of messaging, so I will give you just one tip that I think is important: write a messaging document. Every campaign you create or new piece of material you build is going to have a slightly different purpose and slightly different messaging. If there isn’t one master m

While the sales story can be mapped out with a team, messaging is not something you want to do in real time with a group. Once the story arc is complete, the marketing team will translate that into messaging that can be used in marketing and sales materials, for campaigns and on the website.

The point of working through the sales story is that everyone in the discussion can agree on how the positioning translates into a “pitch.” To do that, the team needs to agree on how to define the problem, current solutions, the gap and the key purchase criteria that a customer should have when looking for a solution in your market.

The sales story goes on to introduce the product or company and position it in the relevant market category. For example, “Mobileclaimsorama is a mobile claims management solution for insurers,” or “Financialhoohah offers invoice financing to growing small businesses.” Next, the story naturally flows into talking about each of the value themes with

When selling to businesses, a sales story generally follows a common arc. It starts with a definition of the problem that your solution was designed to solve. As a team you can succinctly define the problem your solution solves. In a final sales presentation, the definition of the problem helps to put a boundary around the discussion and frame it i